“Miles didn’t just play instruments – he played people.”

Jazz had long stood at the forefront of groundbreaking music: pushing new ideas into popular culture, worshipping the beat, the rhythm, the groove which stood quite simply for the disenfranchised and the downtrodden.

Yet by the summer of 1969 jazz felt out of step with a rapidly changing world. The civil rights movement had caused huge ruptures to open up across America, and jazz musicians were struggling for a means to express those feelings. Sure, outcasts and mavericks such as Albert Ayler may have strived to turn the anger and beauty of the ’60s into sharps and flats, but compared to the action in the streets those were timidly written artistic manifestos striving to equal the ferocity of a Molotov cocktail. Something had to be done.

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